Black Widow
by Doubleplusgoodduckspeaker
Summary: Oh, what tangled webs we weave... Conflictshipping VaronxMaixJoey.


Written for Round Seven of Ryou VeRua's YGO Fanfiction Contest, challenge pairing Conflictshipping: VaronxMaixJoey. This story is like one of my favorite TV shows this season, _Castle_—an excessively complicated, twisty murder mystery. I switch between present tense and past tense so you all can determine when the flashbacks are happening. Varon needed a last name, and as Lady Blackwell told me to give him a French last name I chose the name Bouchard, which is supposedly derived from the nickname/phrase 'big mouth.' Place your bets now—whodunnit?

* * *

"Oh what tangled webs we weave, when we first practice to decieve."

—Sir Walter Scott, _Marmion._

.

"Black Widow"

.

The eleventh-hour call comes at just before seven in the morning; the boss knows that he will get to work by nine, nine-thirty if it was a late night, but this can't wait. The phone chimes shrilly for the moment before he lifts it out of its cradle and holds it to his ear.

"We need you at the precinct ten minutes ago. This one's important."

He knows better. They're all important.

So he eases out of bed and side-steps the piles of clothing on the floor, throws on the last of the clean clothes and gives one last wistful look to the site of his slumber only minutes before. On the way there his mind wakes up from the cold and before he knows it he's in the zone, the excitement that comes from a new case. Paperwork is for the has-beens and he's itching to stretch his legs and return to running the beat.

"Who's our guy?" He asks his boss, the still fresh-off-his-promotion Tristan Taylor, as the rest of the team assembles in the information hub, a mess of white-boards and cork, with multicolored lines connecting each image and hastily-scribbled word.

"Alright team, listen up!" Tristan's voice cuts through the sounds of chatter, the scratch of chairs against wood and the coffee percolator. "This one is high-profile—a businessman in the Paradius Corporation, a board member at that. He was found dead early this morning, we're still waiting on the time of death but it's presumed that it was sometime last night. I want you all to track down his family and known associates and we need to make a timetable. I want to know every move this guy made the day he died."

He tacks a picture of the man to the corkboard, a bland driver's license photo, but that's all it takes for Joey Wheeler to recognize him. He knows that face well, not for him but for one close to him—just one. He finds himself whispering the name, softly but not quite reverently.

"Varon."

The funny thing about days that start off badly is that they keep getting worse, and Joey's day is already shot to hell when Varon's wife arrives at the station just minutes before five, like she'd been putting it off. He hates seeing people walk into his office looking scared; he's one of the last that still believes in being innocent until proven guilty. He offers her a chair and some coffee which she refuses. There's something about looking at her from across the table that makes Joey think of home, but he shakes it off, launching into the interrogation. They're being recorded, after all.

"I need you to state everything, you know, for the record." He leans back a bit in his chair, as if to give her a little more room.

She stares at him levelly, eye to eye, the quirk of her lips a tell that something is a private joke to her. "My name is Mai Valentine, and I was married to Varon Bouchard for four years."

"Any real reason why you kept your surname, Mai Valentine?"

"There was no _real_ reason why I shouldn't have." He doesn't think her a feminist, but keeping one's name was a comfort, and he knows of no one more comfortable in their own skin than her.

"Do you know why anyone would want to kill him? Anyone with a grudge against him? Have you noticed anything out of the ordinary, recently?"

She arches an eyebrow at him and he reads it the way she intended for him to. They were both capable of saying one thing and meaning another. "Besides the obvious? Varon was on the board of one of the top weapons manufacturers in the world. Paradius had its fair share of enemies, but I don't know of any personal grudges he may have had with anyone."

After the questioning Mai stops just short of the door, a hesitant stiffness unlike her normal poise and composure. "When… when will you release the body? I know he'd like to have a proper funeral."

"We'll be in touch, don't worry," he reassures her, just as troubled as she is that they have been thrown together like this, in the worst of ways. In his line of work, coincidences are often a sign to start running. Everything happens for a reason. He blinks and sees her again behind his closed lids, the way he remembers her when he knew her first.

* * *

He first met her five years earlier, in Vegas of all places. He was with his friend Tristan, both of them just newly-minted cops, on a trip to see the sights, to experience life in its rawest, basest form. They walked the strip, each hotel grander than the next, and when they arrived on the steps of the Paris resort and casino, they'd thought they'd seen it all.

"She's gorgeous." He must have said something on his way to her table, leaving Tristan to return to their hotel next door as he proceeded to throw away most of his money in an hour's worth of blackjack. He was caught in her web of bright eyes and big smiles—among other things—and hardly noticed his reserves were running dry. When he noticed he couldn't even ante up for the next hand, he put his cards down, a playful smile on his face. "If I win it all back, I'll come and visit you tomorrow," he said.

He won it all back.

He visited her every night that week.

He had a feeling she was using the house to her advantage in more ways than one, but every night he walked away with roughly the same as when he started. Tristan had found some cute thing at the Bellagio and they had parted ways for the moment, content with their own chase.

The last night he caught her slipping tens into the shoe, but the other patrons at the table were too far gone to even notice anything other than the spectacle. He knew that each rotation was an hour and once they had run through the rest of the cards and the others at their table got up to leave, he swiveled in his chair to her. He always sat to the dealer's left; at least, he did now.

"I caught you." He placed one hand over hers, the one that still rested on the green felt of the table.

"Then catch me." He closed the distance between them and kissed her, the burn of alcohol lingering on his tongue tempered by something else he couldn't quite name. He caught her again, feeling light-headed with the rush.

"I love you."

He seemed as shocked as she was, casting an eye to the half-finished drink cast aside on the table. No, he had only had one… had he really meant it? He was not in the habit of taking back what he said. "I love you."

"Then love me."

He waited for her to clock out and gather her things, and they could have been lovers in the way he pulled her to his room in the Bally's next door, laughter in his voice and in his eyes, filled with the promise of that love. But when he woke up in the morning, she was gone—he had no way to reach her, he had nothing more than her name. Mai Valentine.

He left Vegas broke and broken-hearted and threw himself into his work, case after case. He started bringing his work home with him, and then the work followed him there and struck its teeth into his very core. It all made his heart ache, the loving and losing that was at the same time too much and never enough.

* * *

Joey has the dubious honor of questioning the least-intimidating member of the board of Paradius, which was saying something as Raphael was seven feet if he was an inch, and set his steely-blue eyes at him with every question that made him feel as if it must be _his_ fault for inconveniencing everyone; either his for making him leave work to go to the station or Varon's for dying in the first place.

"This messes everything up," he continues, "because Dartz was about to name the new chair of the corporation, and now he's stalling—we've had to renegotiate several of our contracts because of it."

"I take it your priority is the company's bottom line?" At another silent, steely glare Joey stands up and weakly shakes hands with the giant. "I'll let you get back to work, then."

The results have come back from the lab and they aren't good. There are no signs of a forced entry into the house and no evidence—whatsoever. Usually in cases like these it's exactly the opposite—knife wounds are messy, and the victim never just lets it happen. They fight like hell, and the perp leaves his tracks everywhere, sweating and spitting, tracking through the blood that has begun to pool onto the floor. The victim would scratch, and there'd be skin underneath his fingernails that they could trace. But not this time. Varon was found by the maid, who had come in early to get a head start on cleaning the expansive house, who by then had burst into tears and clung to her boss, sobbing, ruining part of the crime scene before the boys from dispatch were able to ruin the rest of it.

But this crime was swift and silent. A knife to the heart and the body was laid face down on the carpet in the downstairs living room. Otherwise it was as if the entire scene was undisturbed. They were checking the security camera feeds and scouring the grounds, and Joey put in a request that the body be checked for drug levels—there was no other way Varon would take something like that without a fight. But a few missing pieces to their puzzle still remain, and that Friday, the blessed end of the workweek, Mai returns to the precinct to fill out the paperwork and confirm Varon's funeral plans. Tristan finds her on page number three and although Joey suspects that this is not a conversation they want to have out in the open like this he sticks around anyway, hovering in the doorway, making a show of refilling the coffee percolator.

"We were reviewing the security feed on your house from the night of the murder," Tristan begins, perhaps a little harsher than he means to. "And we found something that I'd like to ask you about. You left at around seven that night and never returned until the next day—until after the deed had been done. Where did you go?"

Mai weighs his question in the slope of her shoulders and the scratch of pen against paper as she completes another line. "I can't tell you," she says, her voice strong but with a proud sort of sadness.

"Mai Valentine, where were you between midnight and two AM?" Tristan's voice is harsher now, he has never been capable of controlling his emotions. Mai raises her eyes to him and looks through him, past him to where Joey stands, a paper cup half-raised to his lips. She holds the silence for a minute more.

"I can't tell you where I was, but I didn't kill him."

Joey believes her.

* * *

"Big brother, I knew it was you. I can tell by the sounds of your footsteps." Serenity doesn't get up to greet her brother, but her smile brightens the room in ways that the cream-colored ceiling light cannot. He shifts the flowers to his other hand so he can give her a hug, and she runs her fingers over each petal and stem.

"Daisies, right? Can you tell me about them?" Her voice is breathy, but it doesn't falter anymore. They have an agreement—she can ask him for anything, and he will be her eyes.

Joey gets up to refill the plastic two-liter bottle he had been using as a vase. His words are spoken carefully, in-between the rushing of the water from the tap. "Each one is a different color—they're wild African daisies. The one in your left hand is orange, just like the fruit." He describes the vendor he bought them from, and how these are the most perfect flowers he has ever seen—even more perfect than the ones he brought her last week. She giggles at all the right times in the story, and to them it is just like old times, except for one big difference.

The hospice that Serenity is living in is small and specializes in cases like theirs: exceptional ones, strange ones, dangerous ones. It is taking up a hefty chunk of their savings but she needs to be re-acclimated to the world, to greet it for what it is and to know it in ways that Joey cannot. He bites back a growl of frustration. Seeing her like this, even so happy in the face of everything that had happened just makes him so mad, so mad because it was his fault—his and no one else's. He hates that all he can do for her now is name the colors of the flowers in her hands.

It was six months ago in the heat of a summer so arid it was as if the city had dried up and shriveled away to nothing. That's how he remembers it—the carefree, young summer in the instant before the sun was snatched away from them both. The convict of one of his earliest cases—a thug of little means but deep connections—had been released from jail early on good behavior, or on a technicality, and was out for revenge. Not on Joey himself, that was never their style.

He had received the warnings that afternoon at his desk and by the time he had gotten back to their house to warn Serenity it was too late. Acid had destroyed what was left of her already poor vision, and it had taken months for the scars around her eyes to fade to the marks that would forever frame her face.

Joey would have tracked him down to the ends of the earth, but the man had chosen one of the seedier bars in Domino to make his last stand. He had no intention of going back to jail, but if he was going down he was going to take Joey with him. He brought out his knife and for a few minutes they had fought over it, one darting closer with each moment, one barely dodging each thrust. Once he had gone in for the kill Joey had somehow managed to grab the knife in the struggle but by then it was too late and they had tumbled backwards, the weapon imbedded into its unwilling target. Joey was frozen, unable to even remove his hands from the hilt. It was only sheer luck that had saved him from the rest of the mob; the bartender was an informant to the police and had called at the first sign of trouble.

The judge and jury had declared it self-defense, but that did nothing to erase the dark stain on his record, the publicity and the unwanted attention. The fact that he had still taken a life and none of it would cause his sister to see again. He had been passed over for promotion and instead it had been given to his friend Tristan Taylor; unsure at best in his new role and determined to do everything by the book to ensure that no matter what happened down the road they could tell the judge and jury that they followed the law to the letter.

Something had broken between them that day, a bond that they had always shared but had never needed to speak about, and Joey knew that it was over when Tristan had stopped visiting Serenity; when Tristan had gotten _his_ promotion.

* * *

"So… this Paradius Corporation… have they always been this shady, or do they operate on an if-I-told-you-then-I'd-have-to-kill-you kind of code?" Joey constantly re-organizes their evidence wall for this case; small color photos surround one larger one of Varon smirking at the camera. Red lines for family, green lines for business relationships. A picture of the murder weapon and several experimental tests for the direction of the knife wound are scattered off to one side. He often thinks that someone should take a picture of these boards at the end of each case instead of writing a report; it's a shame that something that took so much time and effort should be bagged up in a storage facility at the end of it all. That's the bureaucracy at work, part of the daily grind just like them. He tacks another picture to the board.

"Well, what would you expect from an organization that deals primarily in weapons transport and surveillance equipment?" Tristan asks, stopping for a moment to admire the suspects board. "When Kaiba Corporation dissolved their empire, PC filled that void, taking on all of their contracts and even hiring their old board members." He laughs at his diminutive of the company name, as letters can means multiple things to multiple people.

"Do you know why Kaiba did it? He turned a weapons manufacturer into a toy company, right?"

"Only he knows that. It seemed like a funny thing to me—the guy looks like he could use some of his own medicine—but hey, it meant less work for us. But this company, they deal more in the export and import side of the materiel, and to me it doesn't look good. They're toeing the line for us now, but I'd hate to see what we find if this were a real investigation of them."

Joey finishes the maze and steps back to admire his work. They had found what could have been tracks in the backyard of Varon's house, which meant that they knew the routes of ingress and egress. They just needed an identity of the killer. Some evidence to stick, or a confession. "We're not investigating them?"

"Joey, are you crazy? We're investigating Varon's death, not their chain of command. I don't want anyone else to get hurt because we stuck our noses where they didn't belong. We can't do anything without proper cause. That reminds me, if I had to place my bets anywhere, I'd say it was the wife that did it." Joey scoffs at that—Tristan isn't known for his gambling prowess. Yet neither is he, if he remembers correctly.

"She said she didn't do it. What reason would she have, anyway?" Joey hates that he's getting defensive again over her but he can't help it.

"She's married to the man for four years, gets bored maybe, or wants the money—it wouldn't take much to hire somebody for the job. What do we know about him, anyways? Was it even a love match?"

Joey turns to the pictures on the wall and imagines a thousand other pictures just like that on their wall, or mantel, or wherever they put their pictures. They would both be smiling in them. He was sure of that. "From what I've heard, he was crazy about her."

* * *

He saw her again three months ago, in Domino of all places. He was sure it was fate that brought her there, to the very same street corner that he had just walked out onto. "Mai? Mai Valentine?"

He knew in the way she turned to him she was not expecting it. She stilled, her eyes wide behind the painted and parted lashes, and for a moment they are an island in a river of people who saw them as nothing more than an obstacle to navigate around. When she did speak it was more of a whisper. "Joey?"

At first he didn't see the ring on her finger. It was only after the preliminary questions—what does one even ask the object of a whirlwind romance years after the fact?—that Mai had refused Joey's invitation to dinner, softly informing him that she had to be back because her husband was expecting her.

"Wait… you're serious? I never would have expected it." He just didn't quite know what else to say. Mai Valentine had tied the knot… he had always entertained the smallest, glimmering hope that, when in Vegas, they would have spared a minute for that mockery of the sacrament and she would have been his. Then he would have had an entire lifetime with her… to make it up to her.

He had gotten the smallest of details out of her. His name, his employer. They had met when his motorcycle had broken down on a jaunt out into the desert of Nevada and he had stumbled alongside the road until she had taken pity on him and pulled over. Delirious and dehydrated, he had thought she was an angel. She was no angel, she had said. All the same, they had saved each other.

The next day at work Joey had looked him up in the police archives. Varon Bouchard, board member of Paradius Corporation. His life story would have been something out of a fairytale book, or would have been if he hadn't read it before. He knew Kaiba from the old school days and he immediately made the connection—both orphaned, both rose to power in an arms corporation. Yet where Seto Kaiba had completely dissolved that part of the company, PC remained steadfast, taking up the niche that KC had left behind. It was good business sense, even though the violence they perpetuated was senseless.

At first he had hated Varon. Hated him for what he had, the life he had. Who he had. The hate sobered with time as he realized that the truth was that he wanted to _be_ him, if only just for one day—to discover for himself what that life would be like, with all its gives and takes. Back then, when he looked at that picture, he wanted to know just what was driving him. He wanted to know just what Varon possessed that Joey himself didn't have.

* * *

Now, when he looks at that picture, all he can think of is solving this case. For Varon of course, and for Mai, but also for himself. He often wonders what he's still doing here. This is just too close to home; he's not thinking straight.

Tristan is getting pressure from the higher-ups for answers; the days stretch longer and longer as they present less to show for them. They only know a few things for sure: that the killer had entered the house through the back-yard and that he had drunk himself into a sound slumber the night before. They are still puzzling over the angle of the knife wound; duplicative testing shows that the stab was a sharp upward motion, not a stabbing downward motion.

Joey walks into the interrogation room to hand in the files Tristan had requested from the evidence locker to find that Mai Valentine is sitting in the chair opposite the heavy wooden desk. "Joey, you're just in time," Tristan says, taking the papers with a tight-lipped smile. "Maybe you can get a confession out of her."

"…Mai…" He ignores the pointed look from Tristan, realizing his mistake; in this business no one ever uses first names with a witness or suspect. He doesn't know why, it's just not done. "Well, did you do it?"

"Of course I didn't." She gazes back at him fiercely. "I couldn't have."

"If you know something that is relevant to the case, you have to tell me," Tristan continues. "I can charge you with obstruction of justice. If it sticks, it stays on your record for life. You don't want that. Look," he says, folding his fingers together in a gesture of supplication, "there's nothing to be scared of if you're innocent. You have nothing to fear."

"I'm not scared for myself," Mai says. Her composure is starting to slip. She falters before glancing quickly behind her through the open door into the space beyond, where the lesser cops have their desks in neat rows. With a motion for Mai to remain seated, Tristan ushers Joey into the adjoining viewing room. Joey quickly closes the door, shutting them off from the outside.

"This is going nowhere." Tristan runs a hand through his hair. From the central heating and the stress of the day it has begun to droop from its precision-gelled shape. "Joey, I've always trusted your judgment. What do you make of all this?"

"I know that she's innocent." He's always known it. She could never have killed him. She loved him, and although he will never understand it he can at least give her this much. At least their conversation is taking place there, in his cramped room, rather than out in the open where anybody can overhear. He knows that they'll look at him differently if they knew and he doesn't want to see it in their eyes.

"Really? How do you know that?" Tristan asks, his voice sarcastic.

Joey chances a quick look at the one-way mirror. He knows that Mai can't see or hear him. She can't stop him from saying the words that seem to tumble from his mouth.

"Because she was with me." He says it with the slightest tinge of pride because he _has_ to but on the inside he's dying, cringing from the mess this has all become. On how simple it all seemed but how complicated it became. "She came to see me that night and was there the entire time, I swear it."

_The eleventh-hour call comes at just before seven in the morning. The phone chimes shrilly for one moment, only one because he doesn't want to wake the woman sleeping at his side._

_Mai Valentine had arrived on his doorstep shaking from the cold. He pulled her inside, no questions asked. She wasn't shaking from the cold. She needed help; Varon was in trouble and even though she had promised not to tell anyone about it she had to now, for his sake if for no one else's. He needs the kind of help only a cop can provide. Joey promises to do what he can; he just wants the truth._

_Varon had always intended to be the chair of Paradius Corporation. Only the chair could dissolve the weapons organizations affiliated with the company. Only the chair could use that power to end the cycle of violence and turn the company into a force for good. So Varon had gritted his teeth and done what was necessary to one day be on top of the pyramid, and that day was approaching. Dartz was going to name him as the next chair. _

_Mai had known it from the start because he had told her everything. It would be his penance, he had said. The ultimate atonement for a lifetime of sins he had committed. She had agreed instantly to help him, to marry the man she had come to love and who had loved her so passionately in turn. She would find out other things about him later—of a life that he shamefully kept hidden from her, one that she could never fully participate in because of things she couldn't change. Joey had always made that connection, had seen the similarities. In his line of work, coincidences didn't exist. _

_So Mai didn't protest when, weakly, she collapsed into Joey's arms and the tender kiss he pressed to her forehead became something much more intense. She must have known what coming there meant. He had never known what it would come to mean. _

_The phone call. There had been a murder, a high-profile one at that. He eased out of bed and side-stepped the piles of clothing on the floor; hers and his intermingled on the worn carpeting. He gave one last wistful look to the site of his slumber only minutes before._

"You… you didn't…" Tristan has never been at such a loss for words. In his mind he gropes for what to do next, realizing that his entire case had been building on the fact that she was guilty. He was hoping to present the case to the station chief as soon as he had gotten her confession. He walks back into the room and motions blandly to Mai, still too dazed to think, to act. "You're free to go…"

Mai bolts from the room and Joey follows her. He catches her on the street outside the station, chest heaving from the sprint. He wants to embrace her and he tries to but she pushes him away. "Please, just leave me alone." It is cold outside but she can barely feel anything.

"Mai, I can't. You caught me that very first night, and I love you. I love you so much it hurts." It hurts him even then to admit it but he has to do something or it will all overflow. One person can't have so much inside them, hurt and hate and boundless love, and he wonders if he loves so much because he can't let the negative feelings overtake him. He knows she's lived that same life of hurt and hate and regret; from the pain that comes from loving two people at the same time, to be bound to someone slipping away from her and to be confronted with someone who loves her for her, wholly and completely. Being split between the two would tear her apart. He opens his arms and envelops them around her.

"I never meant to," she whispers into his shoulder. She thinks she can hear his heartbeat pounding against his chest, and wonders if he can hear hers.

Joey returns to the precinct to face the music. Tristan is reading a memo on several printed pages. "Joey, I want to share with you the newest breakthrough on the case. I only just received it. The security cameras did get a split-second image of the killer. He managed to stay out of their path for the most part, but we have several stills of the back of his head. He had blond hair."

Joey feels his blood turn to ice; feels the shivers and the startling revelation that accompanies the words he can't escape. He can see the other cops curiously glancing in his direction. There will be no running; that makes it look a thousand times worse. So he stands there and takes it.

"Then the pieces started to fall into place." There is no stopping Tristan now; the worst part is that, faced with the blank slate he has just been thrown into, he has bet all his chips on this. Joey has known Tristan for long enough to know that he sometimes says things he doesn't mean, but he knows that this time Tristan believes every word.

"The knife wound to the chest, the irregular stabbing pattern?" Tristan continues. "It was set up as if Varon Bouchard had fallen onto the knife. It's a mirror of that one case that caused you so much trouble. The pattern is obvious, now."

Tristan begins to approach Joey, slowly and cautiously. With that one particular case their bond had broken; a bond that they had always shared but had never needed to speak about. It spread through them unnoticed like a virus, only then springing to the surface. "The affair was the last straw. With Varon out of the way, you can have her all to yourself."

"I never wanted that. You think you've solved anything? The real killer is still out there! We've got to do something, act now!"

"We need to ask you a few questions first," Tristan says. Three of his former friends surround him and begin to usher him farther into the precinct, to rooms where he would be forced to sit at the other end of the table. "We need answers now before we do anything else. I'm sorry Joey, but we have to do things by the book."

"To hell with the book! You have to do something! Mai could be in danger! Mai—!" Eyes wide, he has no choice but to stagger behind walls of stacked cinderblock, to run the gauntlet before he earns the right to convince them that he is not the one they need to be worried about.

* * *

Mai has only walked half of the distance back to the hotel she was staying at—she just couldn't bring herself to sleep in that house while the investigation was still under way—when she sees him. He walks towards her with long strides, briefly shows her the weapon he holds in one hand while grabbing her arm with his other hand. It was only when she was seated in the passenger seat of his car that she has the courage to speak. "Varon trusted you," she says, her voice bitter.

Rafael turns his head slightly to look at her, his blond hair shining in the afternoon light. "He shouldn't have," he replies.

"You think you can get away with this?" She can't believe she is actually saying it, but all the same she wants him to know. "You were never going to be named chair—even now, I'll bet Dartz hasn't chosen another successor. And Joey will—"

"For now Joey is not our problem; the rest of the police force has seen to that." Rafael smoothly guides the car onto another road; the place he is headed for is set farther away from the city center. "I wasn't about to let Varon ruin my entire life's work, to drive our company into the ground like Kaiba did for Kaiba Corporation. He almost succeeded. If Dartz knew how I'd saved our company he would make me the new chair."

Mai wants to argue but knows that nothing she can do will change his mind. The route he takes is familiar; he is driving to her house. "Why are we going to—?"

"It's the last place they'll expect," Rafael sneers. "The scene of the crime."

He pulls into their driveway and parks close to the house. Everything is silent and still as he slowly walks her up the steps and to the front door. "You're going inside first," he says, unlocking the front door using the keys he had taken from her during their car ride. He opens the door and pushes her inside.

"Freeze!"

"Don't move!"

Out of the bushes and trees storms a squadron of armed officers, guns trained on Rafael. Another group bursts from inside the house, putting distance between Mai and Rafael. Once Joey had convinced them of the identity of the real killer, one phone call was all it took to show them that Mai hadn't arrived back at the hotel. They had raced against the clock to get to the house in time and they had only just barely made it.

The leader of the group is wearing a dark bulletproof jacket and has tall spiky hair. His voice carries over the shouts of the other officers. "You are under arrest for the murder of Varon Bouchard…."

After a moment of resistance, he lowers his weapon and they lead him away.

* * *

"Serenity, there's someone I'd like you to meet."

This time, he hasn't brought her flowers. He elbows the woman forward, her steps unsure as she approaches the bed. Her smile is warm and genuine, and widens as she and Serenity gently shake hands. "My name is Mai Valentine."

Joey can tell she wants Serenity to like her, and he should have told her that Serenity likes everyone. He watches them talk and wonders what would have changed if the murder had never happened. He would have met with Varon and protected him until he became chair, maybe even learned to like the guy despite his attachment to the woman he loved. He would have continued to love her, which was one thing that would never change. He would have settled things with Tristan eventually; maybe even return to the friends they had once been. He would have watched as Paradius Corporation turned into an agent for positive change in the world, and the streets of Domino would be safer that night. They would all sleep soundly in their beds, and maybe they would dream of such a perfect world.

But for now he watches them, moves over to the table to add more water to the vase of flowers, and begins to smile.

* * *

The End.

* * *

Umbrella Disclaimer: I do not own YGO, and this is not a true-to-life depiction of police cases or actual investigations. I'm working off of TV shows, novels and one college course that briefly touched on forensics. I also don't mean to make any sort of judgment calls on anything in particular. With the utmost respect, everything in the story was included to make the story more interesting and to add a deeper sense of _conflict_ among each character. The title was chosen because the phrase Black Widow is often used to describe a female who murders her husband or boyfriends (according to wikipedia), and although Mai wasn't the real killer there was a doubt by many of the other characters that it was her who was behind the murder.

_Thank you_ for reading and _please_ review, they are valued, treasured, and put on my refrigerator.


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